Great to see you give it a try Luke! We just moved out of alpha and in process of implementing remaining features from legacy v1. We are also considering adding Testnet support to bootstrap testnet usage in times of HFs or test other blockchain changes before changes accepted on mainnet.
Compare to last year, I would say we have much more frontends and much more resilient even if steemit.com is to sunset as @smooth suggests, quite confident we can handle the load.
RE: Where is Steem going? How will it get there?